Yours truthfully

Swan Study I. (FinePix S5Pro, 1/250s @ ISO 100; f/8, 80 mm DX)

The more I am working with develop presets in Lightroom, and the more I look at scanned film photos (like in Karl's album from Iceland or the Jenya session by Vera) the more I realize that digital photography is lacking something - and that's character!

I wrote about how "true" one or the other photography method may or may not in a previous article here. And while I still don't think that film (analogue) photography is more "true" than digital photography, film does most certainly have the character that is missing in digital photography.

The JPEG renditions of most camera's (even the Fuji S5pro's film simulations) are mostly plain, boring, neutral, and the camera's auto white balance add's an unwelcome unstableness to the appearance of the photos. Raw data, when first interpreted by a raw converter, is even worse most of the time because it is very flat and completely "undramatic", to say so.

Hence, what's most noticeable is that digital photos lack a consistent look. We try to mimic the look of highly saturated Velvia for this photo, the look of a grainy b/w film for another, the appearance of a strongly vignetted Holga for the third... all in the name of creativity. I'm beginning to question this approach and I start thinking in "sets" that I try to process so that a consistent look is visible (I also tried that in my "Forest Equations" album).


Swan Study II (FinePix S5Pro, 1/180s @ ISO 100; f/8, 80 mm DX)

I think it is one of the biggest challenges of post processing to get a consistent look for a series of photos from the same context. This is both an advantage and disadvantage of digital: you can make a certain set of photos from one session look this and that way, and another set of the same session differently.

There was no so choice in film (except for using filters, and then the effect was permanent). The results with film are, appearance-wise, always consistent. A film has no "auto white balance", it's either made for daylight or for artificial light (hence the need for filters), it has no saturation slider either... it's clear what I mean? And at the same time, film may be flawed - it's colors may be more or less "off", it may be too saturated, etc. - all in all those are the things that define the "character" for me.

Digital leaves the freedom to everything and anything on the computer. The difficulty is to choose a wise approach that will not result in a too messy and mixed result. I'm happy with the individual results of my snapshots from Zürich but the album as a whole... it's just not consistent.

And it can't be. Had I processed each photo with similar settings, I wouldn't be happy with some of them. Which kind of questions if I can stick to my own statement that I made in a previous post (" think it is the wrong approach to try to find something worth keeping by playing with presets and whatnot in a photo that would not be a keeper otherwise.").

Striding the digital domain of photography with all of it's choices can be heaven and hell it seems.